Born Fighting (15 page)

The Ulstermen as well as many German settlers were ready to come. And once they began their trek, the road that stepped out into the wilderness from Lancaster became an ever-lengthening highway. Settlers from Pennsylvania immediately poured into the lands made available through Gooch’s land grants. The Germans, typically wealthier and more stable, bought good lands in the northernmost areas of Virginia and western Maryland and for the most part remained on them rather than continuing the southward migration. The migration from Germany itself dried up in the early 1750s even as those from the north of Britain, and particularly from Ulster, kept increasing. The odd political situation of the non-Anglican Protestants in Ulster did not abate, and in combination with a series of crop failures and famines in 1740–41, 1744–45, and 1756–57 drove many more families onto the small ships that sailed for Philadelphia. New turmoil enveloped Scotland, brought about by Bonnie Prince Charlie’s romantic but absurd attempt to reinstate the Stuart family to the throne, an effort that Winston Churchill termed “one of the most audacious and irresponsible enterprises in British history.”
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His defeat at Culloden in 1746 added a mix of highlanders and border dwellers from northern England and southwestern Scotland to the surge of emigration.

The North and South Carolina governments, representing the interests of a less-refined governing class that was similar to the three-tiered society dominated by Tidewater aristocrats, quickly followed the Virginia pattern. Again the English aristocrats benefited enormously, although the Carolinas were not nearly as tightly structured as the Virginia colony, eventually allowing the Scots-Irish to have far more influence in those governments.

In 1663 a grateful (and possibly inebriated) King Charles II had granted all of what is now North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee to eight English lords in order to thank them for helping him reclaim the British throne after the death of Oliver Cromwell. The equally grateful lords named the territory Carolina (a latinization of Charles), probably as an obsequious gesture to Charles but ostensibly in honor of his father, King Charles I. These eight “lords proprietors” and their heirs controlled the land from their English baronies on the far side of the Atlantic until 1729, when the descendants of seven of them sold the titles back to the Crown so that North Carolina could become a royal colony with the same legal status as Virginia. The one exception was John Carteret, the earl of Granville, who kept his inherited properties—a massive stretch of land that comprised almost the entire upper half of what is now the state of North Carolina, including the modern-day cities of Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and Asheville.

In truth Lord Granville had taken a gamble, for unlike the Virginia colony, the Carolinas had not prospered. By 1729 there were only some thirty thousand non-Indian inhabitants, mostly English settlers who had inched down along the coast from southeastern Virginia. The land had no navigable rivers for commerce, in contrast to the James, Potomac, and Rappahannock Rivers in Virginia. And other than a marginal port at Wilmington, only Charleston could compare to the many sea-friendly and deepwater ports in Virginia. But Granville’s holdings straddled the Great Wagon Road, and as the unending stream of hard-bitten settlers from the north spilled into North Carolina, he and his agents prospered beyond belief. The movement into the Carolinas was “one of the mightiest migrations of colonial times. So great was the tide pouring in from the north that, by the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the North Carolina back-country had at least sixty thousand settlers, while that of South Carolina had eighty-three thousand—almost four-fifths of the colony’s white population.”
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Some estimates put the number much higher, claiming that the backcountry of North and South Carolina had grown from almost zero in 1750 to a quarter million settlers by 1780.
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An interesting distinction revealed itself during the settlement of the Carolinas, which may have given the impetus for the Ulster Scots to begin calling themselves Scotch-Irish, a term that became interchangeable in later years with the more ethnically proper Scots-Irish. Beginning in the late 1740s, a colony of Scottish highlanders fresh from the defeat at Culloden had made their way into North Carolina through the port of Wilmington rather than along the Wagon Trail, settling in the North Carolina Piedmont. Tensions between the Ulster Scots and the highlanders were immediate and strong. On the surface the two groups, although having their origins in the same small country, now had little in common. They dressed differently, used different idiomatic languages, and, most important, had different political beliefs. The Scottish highlanders would overwhelmingly support the loyalists during the Revolution, while the Scotch-Irish were the strongest supporters of the movement to declare independence. Within a few generations these differences would disappear, but in the years just before the American Revolution they were significant and in some ways defining.

Many responsible historians claim that the term “Scotch-Irish” was not used until “the late nineteenth century, when real and imagined descendants of settlers from Ulster embraced it to distinguish a Protestant people from Catholic Irish immigrants streaming into the country.”
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But we begin to see a general use of the term almost from the beginning of the mountain settlements. James Logan would write as early as 1730, “They are of the Scotch-Irish (so called here) of whom J. Steel tells me you seem’d to have a pretty good opinion but it is more than I can have tho’ their countryman.”
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As another example, in 1755, Arthur Dobbs, an Ulster-born governor of North Carolina, wrote of a group of families that had settled on land that he owned, “They are a colony from Pennsylvania of what we call Scotch-Irish Presbyterians.”
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As yet another, Nathaniel Grubb complained in 1763 to the Pennsylvania legislature that “a pack of insignificant Scotch-Irish” was responsible for having retaliated too fiercely against a series of Indian attacks.
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Leyburn seems to think that Anglicans and Quakers applied the term to the Ulster Presbyterian immigrants as something of a slur, to distinguish them from both Anglican Irish and “true Scots.”
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It is also logical to assume that the reverse was equally true. The Scots-Irish, not wishing to be associated with the views of many who had migrated directly from Scotland, may well have begun using the term to distinguish their unique origins and perspectives, and especially their strongly held views about the English aristocracy, well before there was a need to draw a cultural point of demarcation between them and the Irish Catholics who would migrate a century later. This probability fits well with Irish historian R. F. Foster’s characterization of the Ulster Scots’ “religious and cultural apartness that enabled communities to emigrate and stay together . . . The Ulster Scots stood out: possibly because, even in the New World, they remained ostentatiously separate,”
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thus allowing their cultural uniqueness to plant itself for generations inside tightly knit communities on the frontier.

This migration into the mountains, especially considering the thin population of America at that time, was indeed historic. Along the narrow mud trails that traversed the ridges and disappeared for miles inside dark forests were Scots, English, Irish, Welsh, French, Swiss, and a good number of Germans who generally kept to their own communities. But mostly, overwhelmingly, the road heading south from Philadelphia was filled with the Scots-Irish Presbyterians who had poured out of Ulster. As the decades of the mid-1700s passed, hardscrabble settlements grew up all along the spine of the Appalachians in places where few Europeans had dared to travel only a few years before. The people came in surges, like an incoming tide. After the Shenandoah Valley met the mountain town of Roanoke, the waves of voyagers split. Some headed farther southwest, down what was called the Wilderness Road, into the gaps and hollows of the difficult mountains and fast-rushing streams where modern-day Tennessee meets the southwestern tip of Virginia. Others pushed directly south, keeping to tamer trails and gentler ridges along what became known as the Great Philadelphia Wagon Trail and ending up in the Carolinas.

From start to finish, this highway of mostly northern British immigration stretched nearly seven hundred miles. Whole families walked hundreds of miles, some of them using cows as pack animals. These were uncommonly tough people, used to hardship. They asked for nothing from the government or anyone else, and nothing is what they usually received. They followed the Wilderness Road into the backcountry and the Wagon Trail into uncharted Piedmont and mountains where only the Indians dwelled, creating a series of log cabin settlements that were little more than small but interconnecting fortresses. Trees were cleared. Cabins were built. Subsistence crops were planted. They built churches, the Scots-Irish first following the Presbyterian faith, but over time becoming more and more inclined to adopt the evangelical Baptist and Methodist denominations, again possibly to draw a line between their communities and the tamer form of Presbyterianism being brought directly from an increasingly enlightened Scotland. By 1906, of the 793,546 members of religious denominations in Virginia, 416,000 would be Baptist, 201,000 would be Methodist, and only 40,000 would still call themselves Presbyterian.
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In the mountain communities, their principal economic activities were cattle and hog farming, hunting, trapping, and rudimentary trade, especially with the Indians whom the flatlanders so desperately feared. And every male adult automatically became part of a local militia.

The Indians watched them, mingled with them, and sometimes attacked them, as many of them were settling on ancient hunting grounds that the Indians had agreed among themselves to keep unpopulated. The settlers adapted, learning from the Indians and learning how to fight the Indians when necessary. These communities grew and in their own way began to thrive. The Tidewater aristocracy that had allowed such settlements looked askance at these new Americans, often snidely belittling them for their coarseness and their backward, nonintellectual ways. But their ferocious performance against a variety of Indian attacks that began in 1754 and continued even after the seven years of the French and Indian War gained them not only respect but also an enduring legitimacy. They fought and played by their own rules, expecting no quarter from any enemy and giving none in return. And by the eve of the American Revolution in 1775, they had become a political force in their own right.

The emerging power of the expatriate Ulster Scots had become cause for concern back in Britain, especially among the Anglican elites in Ireland. From 1717 forward into the 1770s, the Presbyterian communities in Ulster had steadily dwindled as exodus became the province’s most common ritual. Family after family made their way to the port cities of Londonderry, Belfast, Portrush, and Larne, risking—and often losing—their lives on small ships heading across the treacherous Atlantic for America. Statistics for this and other early migrations from Britain are difficult to obtain, but it is clear that those leaving from Ulster numbered in the hundreds of thousands. And the last decade and a half of this huge migration, between the years 1760 and 1775, saw not only an estimated 55,000 Protestant Irish leaving Ulster, but also another 40,000 leaving Scotland and 30,000 departing from England.
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These migrations from Britain’s north—Scotland, Ireland, and the border areas—involved substantial percentages of the overall local population and caused concerns in London about the economic future of the North. And as this emigration progressed, the English aristocracy and the Anglicans who controlled Ireland became oddly ambivalent about the departure of so many Presbyterian and other “dissenters.” On the one hand, many of the governing class understood that their own insistence on dominating this subculture was driving it away. On the other, the structure of favoritism toward Anglicans that had been enforced in the wake of the Protestant Reformation had made the large landowners dependent on revenues generated from the very conditions that these people were seeking to avoid.

The earl of Hillsborough, who became secretary of state for the colonies in 1768, was symbolic of this odd duality. A landowner with vast holdings in County Down, the Anglo-Irish Hillsborough was a staunch opponent of large-scale migration from northern Britain to America. He viewed the Presbyterian Scots-Irish emigration not so much in political or even religious terms, but as an economic risk to the aristocracy. Presuming correctly that the Anglicans would continue to dominate Irish affairs, Hillsborough worried that the massive departure of the Ulster Scots to America was reducing both the tax base and the value of land available for leasing in Ulster. In 1753 he had even argued in Parliament that it would be “for the public good to lay a restraint upon poor people leaving the place of their birth without leave from the magistrates of the place.” During this debate he expressed his puzzlement as to why people should be allowed to emigrate “for no other reason but because they hope to live better, or to earn more money in those countries than they can do at home.”
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The Anglicans needed their revenues. And although the London-ordained Test Acts had protected them from strong political challenges to their local authority, the raw business prospects of the Irish situation became severe during periods when the British economy ebbed and flowed. As the Ulster Scots continued to melt into the far horizons on the dangerous little ships that took them to a new beginning, others joined Hillsborough’s camp, searching for the same simple solutions. The secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland was typical of the times. He lamented the reduction of excise revenues coming from Ulster, claiming that the loss of revenues was due as much to emigration as to poverty, and warned that the Scots-Irish emigration was threatening the entire future of Ireland. His suggestion was to create a few more economic incentives that might hold the Ulster tenants to their rented lands, reasoning that “if the cow is to be milked, she must be fed.”
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